Saints Row’s reboot was shown off in a glamorous trailer at Gamescom yesterday, in a short clip featuring explosions, car chases, funky new weapons, and, most importantly, no familiar faces whatsoever. The tone isn’t dialing back to basics as per the first two games but it doesn’t feel like a continuation of the most recent games’ unrelenting chaos either. Instead, it’s something fresh, and that means a fresh cast. The game doesn’t seem to feature Johnny Gat or his rag-tag team of gangsters at all. We didn’t see Shaundi, Pierce, Kinzie, Zemo, or anyone else, and there was definitely no sign of Zinyak.
Gat has been around since day one. The original Xbox 360 game featured a small gang in the city of Stilwater headed by Keith David’s Julius and the turncoat undercover cop Troy. There were others, but most became inconsequential by the sequel which is where Shaundi and Pierce were roped into the Third Street Saints, quickly becoming as iconic within the fandom as Gat and The Boss themselves. This team resurfaced in Saints Row 3 - expanding with the likes of Kinzie and Oleg, - then Saints Row 4, and Gat out of Hell, even making an appearance in the alternate universe title Agents of Mayhem. Frankly, they’ve been pushed to their limits. There’s not much more room to play around with them bar complete rewrites of their characters, which basically already happened between Saints Row 2 and 3 anyway.
These characters are a crucial part of Saints Row history, but they’ve had their time to shine. It's time for fresh talent, but also, it’s crucial that Saints Row proves itself as more than a series of icons doing silly things in lavish purple outfits with a reliance on past glories. Volition can push the series to its limits here, exploring what Saints Row can be when it doesn’t have the weight of fan-favorites cuffed to its ankle. It can craft brand new personas from the ground-up, giving it a newfound freedom, while still expanding on past ideas, taking the best elements of key characters, and approaching those signifiers through new lenses.
Gat is the right-hand man and the bruiser, Shaundi is the suave no-nonsense badass that keeps the business running while everyone fucks around, and Pierce is the sellout. Sorry, Pierce fans, but face it, he’s the foil to the group’s edgy street-weathered grit. They make up a trinity of really lovable characters regardless of how irredeemably terrible they are, sort of like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s gang but with giant dildos and cat masks. Kinzie, arriving late with a side order of highly sexed chaos, is the Frank Reynolds of the outfit. It was a perfect, tried and tested formula that kept Saints Row afloat right up until the end where we became President, got naked while fighting aliens, and broke free from the matrix while disguised as a toilet. But that’s just it - it was formulaic. From Saints Row 2 onward, this formula boiled down to putting this trio into wacky new scenarios and seeing how they would handle the most outlandish of situations. The pseudo-sequel spin-off, Gat out of Hell, cut the formula down to the most basic elements and it felt that the current Saints had run their course.
The stakes always have to go one up, skyrocketing from a street-level turf war to taking on a futuristic band of mercenaries ripped from a comic book to a full-scale alien invasion to surviving hell. There was nowhere left to go beside making The Boss god - we already became a superhero, after all. That self-inflicted competition lost what made Saints Row charming. Granted, given the lack of new GTA content, I’d love for Saints Row to return to its roots and explore down-to-earth, tight-knit stories like our relationship with Carlos, but that isn’t what the series is anymore. Still, there’s a risk when you keep one-upping your own stakes. There’s being silly, and there’s trying to be the silliest. You run out of wiggle room eventually.
Gat could only take the series so far until he became a literal cash-cow, starring in a DLC for a game masquerading as a spin-off that dropped the moniker altogether. Saints Row isn’t Johnny Gat, though. Saints Row 3 ditched him after the prologue, and it became a fan-favorite. Meanwhile, the original was a story about Julius, Ben King, and Troy, with The Boss a hapless bystander caught in their mess. Gat, meanwhile, was the nonchalant ‘cool’ guy that quipped while taking down entire gang operations single handedly. With so many dead, in hiding, or turning on the gang to the police, there was little left for 2 barring new blood and Gat. Gat became Saints Row, but in sticking so close to him, the series lost its identity. By ditching the icons and ushering in new characters, Volition has a chance to capture Saints Row’s essence while bringing something brand new to the table.